The Legend of Hammer Mummies (2008) - Documentary on Hammer's 'Mummy' films. Beginning with the Universal film outings, through to Abbot and Costello, through to Hammer's classic 'The Mummy'
The documentary is written, produced and directed by Derek Pykett and pays tribute to Peter Cushing, Freddie Francis and Roy Ward Baker. The actual documentary is essentially hosted by actor Geoffrey Bayldon, with most of the 3 hour-plus running time focusing on surviving cast and crew members, following some background information on the two producers.
Best remembered for their portmanteau/anthology features, this documentary offers us a chance to hear from such directors as Peter Duffell ("The House That Dripped Blood"), Stephen Weeks ("I, Monster"), Kevin Connor ("From Beyond the Grave"), and Paul Annett ("The Beast Must Die"), owing to the recent passing of the more prolific Freddie Francis and Roy Ward Baker. We get particularly interesting glimpses of Barbara Ewing ("Torture Garden," "Dracula Has Risen from the Grave") and Angela Pleasence, who actually worked with lookalike father Donald Pleasence in "From Beyond the Grave" (and is scared by horror films!). There are anecdotes about stars like Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Jack Palance, Burgess Meredith, and character players such as Bernard Lee, Herbert Lom, and Patrick Magee, but only minute name dropping for Michael Gough, Nigel Green, or Anton Diffring. A pity about the amateurish sound quality but never the less, certainly worth a look for avid fans of Britain's Golden Age of Horror.
In the 1950s Hammer, England’s world-renowned production company, initiated a new style of horror film-making that transformed the genre. At the end of the 1960s, the world that Hammer had helped to create was changing fast – the once-reliable business model was unraveling and audiences wanted something new from their films.
Amid this uncertainty, Hammer’s short-term survival was secured by an alliance with American distributor Warner Bros. The films the two companies made together are among the most renowned in Hammer’s history. Classics such as Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (1968), Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1970) and Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970) were produced alongside the Oscar-nominated epic When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970), the disturbing thriller Crescendo (1970) and the bizarre sci-fi western Moon Zero Two (1969).
The films became increasingly experimental in the 1970s, challenging the perception of traditional Gothic horror with Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972), The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973) and The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974).
HAMMER HORROR: The Warner Bros Years documentary features exclusive interviews with some of the key players from that period, as well as authors and popular culture historians like Sir Christopher Frayling and Jonathan Rigby. Also included are rare production stills, previously unseen film footage, Hammer’s original shooting locations, and access to previously unpublished archive documents.
Tales of the Uncanny is an exploration of the portmanteau horror film format that features dozens of filmmakers, critics and notable fans, providing brief commentary and impressions about major portmanteau titles. It's a history that expands from the silent film era to today.
For those unfamiliar with portmanteau films they consist of several short films often linked by a wrap around narrative. These stories often are adaptations of literary shorts. As expressed in the documentary, the anthology format lent itself to experimentation and freedom for filmmakers resulting in some terrifying, bizarre, funny and unforgettable segments throughout the format's history.
Tales of the Uncanny is about breadth rather than depth, which frankly is perfect since this film is likely to introduce fans to at least a few new titles. Films are generally covered quickly, often one or two segments from each film are focused on. It's apparent which films, or more specifically studio, is most influential on the pool of folks contributing to this documentary since Amicus' portmanteaus are covered most extensively. This makes sense, give the small British studio's commitment to the format and their influence over the format and genre.
Taking a mostly chronological look at the format, the first section begins in the silent era, stepping to 1945’s Dead of Night and the films Amicus and then onto Milton Subotsky’s post Amicus films such as The Uncanny and The Monster Club.
There’s a detour into the world of television anthologies next. Movies such as the 1979 Dead of Night and Trilogy of Terror are covered as are series like The Twilight Zone, Night Gallery and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Tales from the Darkside, Tales from the Crypt and Hammer House of Horror.
Tales of the Uncanny is an enjoyable overview of a much loved film format that should offer many views a string of titles to discover and fall in love with and the blu ray is highly recommended as it contains a few very rare horror anthologies for viewers to enjoy. This is a must watch doc for any horror lover!
Broadcast as a Play For Today by the BBC in 1970, James MacTaggart's Robin Redbreast remains a unique proposition in British television history.
An uneasy tale of human sacrifice deep in the English countryside and an early example of what we now refer to as 'folk horror', it has retained its power to unsettle despite the passing decades.
It can even lay claim to being a prime influence on that most seminal slice of cinematic pagan horror, The Wicker Man, which arrived in all its sacrificial glory three years later.
On 14th February 1945, the lifeless body of Charles Walton, a 74-year-old farm labourer, was discovered in Meon Hill, Lower Quinton, Warwickshire. Walton’s murder became known as the ‘witchcraft murder’ because his body was pinned to the ground with a pitchfork and there is an ancient Anglo-Saxon custom of slashing or sticking spikes into a murdered witch’s skin. This form of murder is called ‘stacung’ or ‘stanging’ – ‘stang’ being a two pointed stick witches associate with the Horned God. Scotland Yard became involved but the murder was never solved and became the stuff of local legend with added embellishments, such as a large cross carved into the victim’s chest which wasn’t in the autopsy notes.
In his book Anatomy of Crime, the detective in charge of the case wrote, ‘I advise anybody who is tempted at any time to venture into Black Magic, witchcraft, Shamanism – call it what you will – to remember Charles Walton and to think of his death, which was clearly the ghastly climax of a pagan rite.’ The witchcraft murders provided inspiration for two pieces of writing that later became known as Folk Horror. The first was a teleplay by John Bowen called Robin Redbreast (1970, James MacTaggart) and the second was a book called Ritual by David Pinner, which became the 1973 film, The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy).
Bowen wrote the play for a suspense anthology series but it was rejected and ended up with Graeme MacDonald, Producer of Play for Today – a BBC1 drama series, that ran from 1970 to 1984:
The transmission of Robin Redbreast, which was broadcast on the 10th December 1970 , coincided with an electrician’s strike whereupon millions of houses in London and the Midlands missed the end. The play was eventually repeated in February 1971 but the original screening, which was in colour, was recorded over and it is now only available in a 16mm black and white telecine recording.
John Bowen (1924 – 2019) was a prolific English novelist and playwright who worked on several long running drama strands including Play for Today and ITV Play of the Week. He also wrote two films for the BBC strand, A Ghost Story for Christmas which ran from 1971 to 1978 : The Treasure of Abbot Thomas (1974, Lawrence Gordon Clark), which is an adaptation of a short story by MR James, and an original drama called The Ice House (1978, Derek Lister). He wrote A Woman Sobbing (1972, Paul Ciappessoni) for Dead of Night, which was a 1972 BBC anthology of short supernatural films. Bowen also wrote another folk horror called A Photograph (1977, John Glenister) https://odysee.com/@Misty_Isles:a/A-Photograph-(1977):1 which can be seen as a loose follow up to Robin Redbreast.
A visual exploration into the origins of witchcraft in the UK and in particular the demystification of symbolism still embedded today within many modern religious artefacts and rituals
Part Mondo movie, part countercultural artefact, 'Secret Rites' is a strange mid-length 'documentary' by exploitation director Derek Ford.
Ford l ifts the lid on witchcraft in 1970s Notting Hill. Mystery band The Spindle provide the groovy, psychedelic sounds while tentative occult enthusiast Penny and a serious-sounding narrator introduce the viewer to three ritual actsis a 1971 British pseudo-drama. It concerns the study of witchcraft and black magic, with a rare appearance by real-life occultist Alex Sanders.
The British series produced by Jim Henson Productions for Channel Four retold various European folk tales, particularly ones considered obscure in Western culture, created with a combination of actors and puppets. The framing device had an old storyteller (John Hurt) sitting by a fire telling each tale to both the viewers and to his talking dog (a realistic looking puppet of a brown and blonde Pudelpointer performed and voiced by Brian Henson) who acted as the voice of the viewers, and was written in a language and traditional style in keeping with old folk tales.
'The Soldier and Death'
Because of kind acts toward three beggars, an honest soldier returning from war is given a magical sack, an unbeatable deck of cards, a ruby whistle and a comparable dance, which he uses to save a kingdom and to foil Death.
psychotherapist Philippa Perry time-travels back to the 1890s to explore how the late Victorian passion for science co-existed with a deeply held belief in the paranormal. Using a collection of rare and restored Victorian films from the BFI National Archive, she shows how the latest media innovations made use of contemporary ideas of ghosts and the afterlife – and how this ‘new media’ anticipated today’s networked world.
The final years of Queen Victoria’s reign were a moment when the old Victorian order rubbed shoulders with the beginnings of our modern world. It was a chaotic, febrile time of discovery and innovation in science and technology, entertainment and art, and the Victorians had to make sense of it all.
Philippa finds out how Marconi’s early experiments with wireless telegraphy encouraged speculation amongst the public and scientists that telepathy – communication between minds – would be the next scientific breakthrough. She also replicates eminent physicist Oliver Lodge’s pioneering experiment with radio waves and discovers his fascination for exploring the paranormal with the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). This Victorian group of ghost hunters included William James, a pioneer of psychology, biologist Alfred Russel Wallace and even Prime Minister William Gladstone. Buried in the archives of the SPR in Cambridge University Library, Philippa finds an incredible Census of Hallucinations that contains 17,000 ghostly encounters sourced from the Victorian public.
Maybe it’s not surprising that people of the age saw so many ghosts because, in a sense, spirits did haunt the Victorian home. Every Victorian innovation - from photography to motion pictures, phonographs to fantasy books – had its own supernatural genre. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the hyper-rational Sherlock Holmes, drew on his real-life experience as a ghostbuster to write his ghostly fiction. Philippa learns the art of spirit photography from Almudena Romero and poses for her own ghostly picture as well as exploring a rare private collection of phonographs, the recent craze that allowed Victorians to hear communications from the past and listen to their loved ones after their deaths for the first time.
Philippa also explores the impact of the arrival in 1896 of motion pictures, the decade’s greatest and most magical media innovation. BFI curator Bryony Dixon shows her restored Victorian trick films, from the funny and feminist to a disturbing fake execution. Philippa then creates her own homage to the Big Swallow trick film and eats the cameraman.
The boundary between fact and fantasy was often blurred, and sensationalism infused the new tabloid journalism. At Cambridge University’s Institute of Astronomy, Philippa learns about other forms of long-distance communication and the flurry of press interest in stories from Mars. Dr Joshua Nall reveals that some of the greatest public figures of the decade, from Nikola Tesla to Sir Francis Galton, were convinced that signalling with Martians was possible. HG Wells’s story The Crystal Egg takes up this theme and predicts future media developments and the power of communications. And even Queen Victoria herself took advantage of the globally networked world that was emerging to allow the film cameras in to capture her triumphant Diamond Jubilee procession for all her imperial subjects. The jubilee was the first global mass media event and the footage captures the essence of the 1890s: the old Victorian order with an empire and an empress, rubbing shoulders with a world we recognise - a modern one of film cameras and global communications. This was the decade the future landed.
The Ridgeway is a ridgeway or ancient trackway described as Britain's oldest road. For at least 5,000 years travellers have used the Ridgeway. The section clearly identified as an ancient trackway extends from Wiltshire along the chalk ridge of the Berkshire Downs to the River Thames at the Goring Gap, part of the Icknield Way which ran, not always on the ridge, from Salisbury Plain to East Anglia. The route was adapted and extended as a National Trail, created in 1972. The Ridgeway National Trail follows the ancient Ridgeway from Overton Hill, near Avebury, to Streatley, then follows footpaths and parts of the ancient Icknield Way through the Chiltern Hills to Ivinghoe Beacon in Buckinghamshire. The National Trail is 87 miles (140 km) long.
The Ridgeway provided a reliable trading route to the Dorset coast and to the Wash in Norfolk. The high dry ground made travel easy and provided a measure of protection by giving traders a commanding view, warning against potential attacks. The Bronze Age saw the development of Uffington White Horse and the stone circle at Avebury. During the Iron Age, inhabitants took advantage of the high ground by building hillforts along the Ridgeway to help defend the trading route. Following the collapse of Roman authority in Western Europe, invading Saxon and Viking armies used it. In medieval times and later, the Ridgeway found use by drovers, moving their livestock from the West Country and Wales to markets in the Home Counties and London. Before the Enclosure Acts of 1750, the Ridgeway existed as an informal series of tracks across the chalk downs, chosen by travellers based on path conditions. Once enclosures started, the current path developed through the building of earth banks and the planting of hedges.